A little while back I asked you for your favorite novels featuring scientists, and your favorite popular science books that a scientist would like, and you came through in spades. Just a quick post to say thanks again for all the recommendations; I added a bunch of them to my Goodreads list and my wife got my some of them for Christmas!
So far I’ve read The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, which as loyal reader Jeff Ollerton guessed was right up my alley. And All The Birds In The Sky, which is hard to describe. Cautionary scifi-fantasy mashup? Interesting, I liked it, but the Big Idea was too obvious for my taste. The characters worked as characters, but they had to do double-duty as The Engineering Worldview and The Left-wing Environmentalist Radical Worldview. I dunno, maybe I’d have found it more compelling if I was less of an optimist and thought that the world really was at risk of being destroyed by a war between those two worldviews.
I just started The Invention of Nature (good so far), and then after that is How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming.
So, what science-y reading did you get for the holiday?
Weirdly, *I’ve* just started The Invention of Nature, which was a gift.
Other science-y books received as gifts:
Dava Sobel, The Glass Universe (about early women astronomers at Harvard Observatory)
Tullis Onstott, Deep Life